


i'll crawl home to her

by usuallysunny



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angry Sex, Arya Stark's Wedding, Confessions, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Forgiveness, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Jealousy, Jon Snow is Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, Mentions of past Jon/Dany, Post Season 8, R Plus L Equals J, Reunions, Sansa Stark is Queen in the North
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:22:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22455652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/usuallysunny/pseuds/usuallysunny
Summary: "Because youleftme!" she explodes.Her fury lashes at him colder than the winds in winter andthere it is– everything they could never bring themselves to say."I didn't leave you," he murmurs, "you sent me away."
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 25
Kudos: 420





	i'll crawl home to her

**Author's Note:**

> here I am, at it again with the angst :)

As Jon breaches the gates of Winterfell for the first time in five years, a chill that has nothing to do with the cold passes through him.

His horse's hooves spray up snow around him and Ghost trots alongside, reaching almost the same height. As he crosses the courtyard, he feels the heat of Northern eyes on him.

Dismounting, he's immediately greeted by a flustered young lord who swiftly bumps into him and scrambles into a bow.

It feels like a punch to the gut and Jon gently clasps a hand on the young boy's shoulder.

"No," he murmurs, "I am not your King."

He was a King once. Before the Long Night, before betrayals and death and stunning queens who broke his heart.

A lifetime ago.

The boy rises to his full height with a sheepish smile. He lingers for only a moment before he rushes off and Jon's alone again.

His dark eyes scan the courtyard and he fights back a shudder. If he squints, he's sure he can see the ghosts of Winterfell. He sees Bran falling from the broken tower. He sees Arya shooting arrows better than her brothers and Robb carrying a giggling Rickon on his shoulders. He even sees Catelyn's disapproving glare from the balcony, the stark difference of his father's – _uncle's_ – gentle smile beside her.

He sees Sansa linking arms with Jeyne Poole, shooting that disdainful look she wore only for him.

It's been decades now but he can't remember anything, before or since, that stung quite like that.

It's an expression she wears now as she walks towards him, her hands clasped delicately in-front of her.

"Lord Commander," she nods like they're strangers, that cold, practiced smile on her lips, "welcome back."

 _Back_ , she says, not home, and the implication burns under his skin.

He doesn't belong here. Not anymore.

His stare is just as cold.

The atmosphere stretches out tense between them, heavy with the weight of everything left unsaid.

"I have had your old chambers prepared for you," as she speaks, Jon notices the changes in her – subtle but _there_. The fire in her hair seems brighter somehow, curling to her waist, and her face has sharpened and softened in all the right places. Her nose and lips are red from the cold and, a girl no longer, her eyes shine with a sort of strength and clarity he's never seen before.

 _The crown suits her,_ he thinks, and he tries to push down the bitter wave of resentment that thought invokes.

"Thank you," he says, his tone polite and measured.

If he didn't know her so well, perhaps he would have missed the slight twitch of her mouth as she's affected by the sound of his voice, heard for the first time in half a decade.

She opens her mouth to say something before swiftly closing it again.

He watches her brows knit together, notices the slight shake to her hands, and he waits to be dismissed.

He has nothing else to say to her, not right now. Not while he's hurt and tired from the journey and tormented by memories of a life lost.

A flicker of _something_ passes over her face, before she gives a curt nod.

He returns it, not meeting her eyes, and as he brushes past her, three thoughts burn through his aching mind.

_I've missed you._

_I_ _love you._

 _I_ _don't forgive you._

Walking through the godswood, the bitter cold nipping at his heels, it's difficult to remember why he came here. Why he left in the first place.

He's not happy to be back, but he's not sad either. The feeling is resigned to some world in-between. It's stuck in his chest, something foreign and familiar at the same time, and he can't understand it, can't quite get to it.

As though to remind him why he returned, Arya Stark emerges from the distance.

He smiles, gentle and sincere, and there's not a beat of hesitation as she runs to him. Closing his eyes, he embraces her, holding her close to his body and lifting her slightly off the cold ground.

It's easy in a way it's never been with Sansa.

 _Sansa_ , her name still cuts through him like a dagger, sharp and just as painful.

Arya looks different too. Older, wiser, she's a woman now. There's a new scar brandishing her cheek, some wrinkles by her eyes and mouth when she smiles – new etchings on a map of a life well travelled. Still, she feels smaller somehow, more vulnerable, and he misses her. She's right here, in his arms, yet he misses her so much it makes him ache.

 _Come home for my wedding_ , her letter had ordered, making him smile, _I went to the edge of the world, but the road always brought me back to Gendry._

"You mustn't be angry with her," she says when they've sufficiently caught up and talk turns to his sister – _cousin_ – "it wasn't her choice to send you North. You know if it was up to her, she'd have you here, by her side."

 _I am angry,_ he bites back the bitter words on his tongue.

_I'm angry she betrayed me._

_I'm angry she lied._

_I'm angry she was right._

He says none of this.

Instead, he embraces Arya again and hides his grief behind a well-practiced smile.

He gets drunk at the feast.

Not _staggering around, unsteady on his feet_ drunk, but enough to blur his vision, churn his stomach. Though, glancing around the place that used to be home, he's not certain that ache can be blamed on the alcohol.

As though drawn by a magnet, his eyes find Arya and Gendry. He sees the way the blacksmith looks at her, all awed and adoring, and he sees the expression mirrored in Arya.

Now named Lord Commander again – not a title he wanted, but one he accepted, given his experience and capability – Jon's very aware he'll never have that. He'll never hold lands. He'll never lay with a wife who loves him, or cradle his newborn son in his arms. He might have had it once. He might have entertained the thought, buried between the legs of first a redhead and then a blonde, women very different, but very fierce all the same.

All gone now – lost with a birthright he never wanted, a throne his brother - _cousin_ \- now sits on. While he sometimes sees the ghost of Ygritte beyond the wall, sees the fire in her hair flicker through the flames that warm him in the snow, here he sees Daenerys. He remembers the feast after the Long Night was won, sees her raise her cup to the very same man twirling his sister – _cousin_ – around the Great Hall.

He closes his eyes against the memory.

 _Guilt_.

It kicks at his stomach like a mule. Five years and it hasn't lessened.

When he opens his eyes and sees Sansa standing in-front of him, he almost wants to bear his teeth. Anger flares in his gut, potent and irrational, and it's like he leaves his body, like he's watching someone else, hearing someone else, as his chair scrapes against the cold stone and he storms off.

He pretends not to hear her follow him, her footsteps rushed and just as furious.

She's someone else, too.

Maybe it's because she's a Queen, maybe she's just always been this way, but she doesn't knock before she enters the chambers that used to be his.

It's silent as he feels her presence behind him, crackling the air. He closes his eyes, a tremble in his hands and an ache in his chest.

When she speaks, finally, the ache intensifies.

"Are you ever going to talk to me?"

Her tone, hurt and confused, cuts through him like a knife and still, he doesn't open his eyes.

He feels, more than hears, her take a step towards him.

She extends a hand and when he finally opens his eyes, he sees it out of his periphery. She seems to consider touching him before she pulls it back, and the air is white hot between them.

"Jon," she whispers his name for the first time in five years and suddenly, inexplicably, his eyes and throat begin to burn, "please."

He can't do this.

Even if it had been 100 years, he still wouldn't be ready.

He turns around, taking a step back from her in the process. She looks angry and wounded and _beautiful_ – he pushes that thought down and buries it – and it hurts too much to look at her, so he chooses anger instead.

"What do you want me to say?" he doesn't miss how she winces at the harshness of his tone, how those tears brimming on the surface sharpen the blue in her eyes.

He watches her chest rise and fall as she takes a shaky breath. He can't remember the last time he saw her so affected, accustomed as he's become to her cold façade, her queenly mask.

He doesn't _know_ this Sansa and it rattles him.

But that's the point, isn't it? She's always had that power.

What she doesn't understand – what she _never_ understood back then – is that every move she made, every infuriating word she uttered, his entire world depended upon. When she was happy, he was happy, and when she wasn't, he… didn't know how to be at all. So all those times she undermined him, all those times she dismissed him like they weren't the only family each other had, all those times she betrayed him and lied to him and went behind his back… all those times she _hurt_ him and she doesn't even seem to realise.

"I want you to talk to me," she says like it's a simple task, rather than something agonising, "about how you are, the years we've spent apart… anything."

 _Anything other than this silence,_ he reads between the lines, worse than when they were children. He, who had treated her with indifference, she who only ever called him her half-brother since she was old enough to know what "bastard" meant.

"I came back for Arya," the implication is clear and he watches her wince again, "there's little point in combing through the past."

She's clearly hurt and his fingers itch – to hurt her, to comfort her, he doesn't know.

It’s infuriating.

"We were a team once," she murmurs, her tone imploring.

His jaw clenches into a hard line. "Too many lifetimes ago to matter."

Something dark passes over her face then, her expression turning hard and mirroring his.

She tips her chin slightly, proud and cold and unyielding.

 _There she is,_ he thinks bitterly.

"That's fair."

He can't help but scoff at that. _Fair_ would be looking at his hands and not seeing Daenerys' blood, for her to have turned out good and just and nothing like her father. _Fair_ would be Sansa not betraying him, not turning his birthright into a weapon to be forged like dragonglass. _Fair_ would be warm nights by the fire, safe behind the walls of Winterfell. King in the North or Warden of the North or _anything_ else, it doesn't matter, as long as he's home.

 _Fair_ would be Ned Stark never travelling South.

Nothing about this is fair.

"I know what you want, Sansa," he hurls her name like a weapon, "you want me to forgive you. I can't."

The starkness of it, the honesty, clearly hurts her and he watches the movement of her graceful throat as she swallows.

Why _can’t_ he forgive her? he wonders at the thought.

When all is said and done, she was right. If he ever did love Daenerys (he’s no longer sure) she wasn’t that woman in the end. She was dangerous and Sansa was only trying to help, trying to keep the North safe. _She_ didn’t burn Kings Landing. _She_ didn’t bring a city to its knees, didn’t fill the air with agonised screams, the stench of skin flayed from bone.

He’s forgiven men for lesser sins. After-all, wasn't he able to forgive Theon for all his betrayals against House Stark _because_ of Sansa? He had loved her that much.

Yet he can’t move past this. He’s trapped, pushed down and shackled by white hot anger.

She chooses anger too.

"Weren't you the one who never wanted to be King?" she bites out bitterly, "who gave it up, gave the North up, at the first opportunity you could get?"

Her words are ice, cutting through him colder than winter, and he feels his jaw clench again.

"I bled for the North," he says quietly, "I bled for you. I fought a war for you."

He reminds her of her short memory, how she begged him to fight for Winterfell, for the North and for Rickon, and how he _did_ \- because she asked him to.

Because… despite being tired and _done_ and only half brought back from the dead… he would have done anything she asked him to.

"And then you fought for _her_."

It's practically a snarl, the wolf in her rising to the surface, and fire flashes through her eyes.

And _there it is,_ the crux of it all. Daenerys is dead, her body carried across the Narrow Sea, and yet her presence is palpable in the widening gap between them.

“I did what I had to do. At the time, we needed her. We needed allies more than I needed a crown,” he says eventually, voice low and quiet, “we're standing here, in part, because of her armies-"

“She murdered thousands of people, Jon.” Sansa bites back without letting him finish, “she burned them alive. Women and children. Innocent people. I cannot believe you are _still_ defending her.”

There’s obvious disgust in her voice, her cold eyes sweeping over him like he’s nothing more than the bastard they believed him to be for so long.

He hates it. He hates _her_. But he loves her too, deeply and infuriatingly and _still,_ and he can’t make sense of it.

She’s still the only thing he knows, the only thing without question, this girl who came hurtling back into his life that windy morning at Castle Black. Things change and people come and go, but _she_ remains. His one, true thing.

His constant – even if it is a thorn in his side.

“I’m not,” he murmurs, but he sounds defeated and thinking about everything that happened with Daenerys hurts, “it’s done, Sansa. You got what you wanted. I killed her.”

_I killed her._

It’s the first time he’s said it out loud and hearing the words is like a punch to the gut. He’s always hidden behind euphemism – _was it right, what I did? –_ and it’s only fitting that he cuts himself open and lays himself bare _now_.

For her.

“Yes, I wanted it,” she seethes suddenly, her voice lined with a poison that almost makes him draw back, “is that what you want to hear? I will do whatever it takes to protect our family, to protect the North. We will never bend to a Southern tyrant again. I did what _you_ should have done, had you not been distracted by what was between her legs. I told Tyrion who you were because I wanted you on the throne. Because you’re good and honourable and the rightful King. I wanted her _gone,_ and I betrayed you to do it, and given the chance, I’d do it all again.”

His anger spikes again and the rage feels white hot in his veins.

He wants to hurt her; he wants to break her like she’s breaking him.

“I didn’t want it,” he repeats what had become his rallying cry, “it wasn’t your choice to make.”

“Nor was it yours,” she counters angrily, “don’t you think we would all love to run away from our responsibilities? To throw off the shackles of our family and live free? What _right_ did you have to say no? So you could live beyond the wall, gallivanting with Tormund without a care in the world? I’d say it all worked out rather well for you, wouldn’t you?”

His mouth twists bitterly.

“That’s rich coming from you, your _grace._ ”

He gives a pointed nod to the elegant crown on her head, the jewels glinting prettily against her fire-kissed hair.

He watches a muscle in her jaw jump.

“Don’t,” she says softly, brokenly, and he’s almost sorry, “I would trade it all for one more day of us being all together. To close my eyes and not see burning bodies, the undead, everyone we’ve lost. We took back Winterfell together and I _wanted_ you to be King. I was there when you were crowned. I sat by your side. Me. Not Bran or Arya. Not Sam. Not _her. Me_. I loved you through everything and you didn't even care.”

He blinks, stunned by her speech, and before he can reply, her impenetrable walls are up around her. She’s given too much of herself away, acted too much like the naïve little girl she used to be, and she turns stubbornly on her heel.

He grabs her wrist, a tight metal cuff, and drags her back to him.

She anchors herself with her other hand on his chest, their wrists caught between their bodies.

“Don’t walk away from me,” he orders, but his voice is soft.

“It doesn’t matter,” she bites out through gritted teeth, unable to look at him, and when she tugs her wrist back, he won’t let her go, “I no longer care.”

“Then why are you crying?”

She lifts her hand from his chest to her flushed cheek, her fingers touching the tears like she hadn’t realised she was until now. 

She yanks her hand back and pushes him away.

"Because you _left_ me!" she explodes.

Her fury lashes at him colder than the winds in winter and _there it is_ – everything they could never bring themselves to say.

"I didn't leave you," he murmurs, "you sent me away."

“That wasn’t my choice,” she chokes, furiously brushing away her tears, “I _begged_ them to let you come home, just like I begged you not to go to Dragonstone. I didn’t want to leave you, but you _chose_ to leave me. You chose her over the North.”

 _You chose her over me,_ he reads between the lines.

Something sparks between them, so palpable he can almost _taste_ it, and he can’t think. He can’t even _breathe._

With a sickening sense of clarity, he realises what it is, this feeling he’s been trying to decipher since the day she came back into his life.

It’s want.

He _wants_ her.

Maybe he always has, something he buried deep down, because what good does it do to dream of pretty girls who’ll never be yours?

 _“I’m sorry,”_ he wants to say, _“I tried my best, and it all went so wrong somehow. I was wrong. Forgive me.”_

But lodged in his throat, the words won’t come.

He doesn't know why he does it. Why he wraps his fingers around the circle hanging from a chain at her neck and drags her to him. Why he swallows her gasp of protest with a desperate, needy kiss.

He just _does_ it - because he's tired of feeling less than when he was dead.

He doesn’t know why she kisses back. Why she opens her mouth to him and surrenders with a whimper. Why she grabs and claws at his jerkin, fisting it in an attempt to bring him closer, swallow him whole. Why she lets him walk her backwards until she’s hitting the stone wall.

But she _does._

He doesn’t think about how wrong this is. How they’re angry and hurting and desperate for forgiveness. How she’s his sister – _cousin –_ and how with every swipe of his tongue against hers, he’s betraying Robb and Ned. Their disapproving glares sear behind his eyes and he kisses her harder to make it stop. He doesn’t think at all.

She grunts his name against his lips, a husky and familiar welcome home.

His hand flies to her thigh, grabbing it and hooking her leg around his hip. He pushes her skirts up to aid him, his hands trembling and frantic and needy, and she arches her back against the wall.

He kisses her again, once, twice, three times on the lips before he drags his mouth to her cheek. Her skin is flushed and he tastes salt and tears – his or hers, he’s not sure – and he sucks a bloom into her neck. She moans, something wanton and desperate, and he itches, _aches,_ to hear it again, to mark her as his.

 _Mine,_ the wolf inside him growls, fighting with the dragon for precedence. _Fire and blood, winter is coming,_ two houses that don’t belong to him, stamped on his skin. Half a dragon, half a wolf, but never a whole of anything.

But he sounds like a wolf as he pants against her neck, desperate for any scraps of her attention.

He bows his head, a groan caught in his throat at the torturously slow rock of her hips into his. There are too many layers of clothing, and not enough, and _still_ , he can’t make sense of this.

“I thought of you,” she whispers as she pulls back and tugs at his jerkin, unlacing it with trembling fingers and tossing it to the ground. He doesn’t reply, _can’t_ reply, as he puts her down and turns her around, too rough. He unlaces her intricate dress faster than he expected, given he hasn’t made love to a woman in years.

He thinks he’d be proud, were the situation different.

How long has he thought of _her_ , he wonders? Buried in the recesses of his mind, something repressed and forbidden. When he sought her council as King, the only person in the world he trusted? When he gifted her Ramsay and marvelled at her strength? When she took his hand, Ramsay's letter between them, and told him to be brave? When he held her in his arms that morning at Castle Black? Before even then, as a young boy, unwanted and unloved and desperate for even half the affection she showed Robb and Bran and Rickon?

He’s always prided himself on being right, on being kind and honourable and _good_ like Ned Stark, but now, he just feels lost.

She brings him back to the world with her hands on his face, dragging his mouth to hers.

“I don’t forgive you either,” she breathes in an icy whisper and the words feel like a millstone around his neck. 

But this isn’t about forgiveness, he thinks, as he strips her bare. This isn’t about absolution or even love, as she claws at his clothes until he’s bare too.

It’s sick, really, the thrill he gets when she twists them until his back is against the wall and lowers herself to the floor. A Queen, on her knees for him. The ghost of the bastard he used to be stirs, his blood rushing to his cock, and his head tips back against the wall when she takes him in her mouth.

“Fuck,” he grunts, sucking a breath over his teeth, as his hands fly to her hair. His fingers tangle in the red strands, ruining her elaborate braids, as he guides and slides her mouth over his cock. Daenerys _never_ did this, probably thinking it beneath her, and he can’t remember lust ever snapping at his heels like this. 

He gets the impression Sansa _knows_ this, because she’s determined. Her small hand pumps what her mouth can’t take, hollowing her cheeks around him, like she’s desperate to be good, to be _better_. To drive the dragon out of their den. Her eyes flicker up to him, pupils wide and blown, and he groans, feeling his balls tighten.

White hot lust sparks through his blood, starting as a tingle in his toes and spreading to a tightly coiled ache in the pit of his belly.

“Sansa,” he grunts, his eyes practically rolling back at the vibration of her hum around his cock. He tries to tug her off, to warn her, but she pulls him closer with her hands on his backside. He feels the head of his cock hit the back of her throat and dark thoughts swirl in his mind - of ruining her like the bastard Lady Catelyn feared he was, of the fact that he had thought of fucking her pretty, highborn mouth more than once, had taken himself in hand and spilled his seed over it.

The coil snaps as he comes with a grunt, filling her mouth with his seed. She swallows it, not wasting a drop, as she stands and kisses him. He tastes himself on her tongue, heady and strong, and he’s walking her backwards to the bed without even realising it.

He’s hard again before her back’s hit the furs.

His hand goes between her warm thighs, finding her soaked and practically trembling.

She’s half bathed in candlelight and flushed and serene and too beautiful to ever be his.

He feels it too.

He wants it so badly, he’s practically shaking with it.

“Please,” she begs in a broken whisper as his fingers spread her wetness, sliding up and down before he pushes two inside, “fuck me, Jon.”

He grunts his approval, too far gone to stop. He covers her with his body, cradled between her thighs, and guides his weeping cock to her entrance. He glances at her once, a wordless check, and with her nod, he pushes inside.

She keens against him, a heated gasp catching in her throat. She spreads her legs wider, drawing him deeper inside, and she’s too hot, too tight, too _good._ She digs her nails into his skin, a wolf marking her prey, leaving moon shaped crescents that make him hiss through his teeth. There’s something primal about it, something animalistic in the desperate snapping of his hips, the way she tilts her own and matches him thrust for thrust.

Cradled between her thighs, he wonders if it would be easier if he couldn’t see her face, beautiful and hurt. If he flipped her over and took her from behind like a wolf, bodies broken and aching and laced with so much pain. But he wants to see her, wants to see the effect he has on her, the way her eyelids flutter when he hits _this_ spot, the way she moans when he touches her _there._

 _She never married_ , the question hangs between them. It’s been five years since she took the crown and longer still since she was the Lady of Winterfell. Was she always his? Has she always felt this way? Is _that_ why she hated Daenerys so much, why she acted so betrayed?

The questions sting in his chest, making his breath feel too short - so much wasted time, so many missed chances - and he pushes them down. He’s good at that.

He would never have touched her before, the good and honourable Jon, even if he’d been able to admit he wanted to. Maybe he’s more Targaryen than he gave himself credit for, maybe he’s just tired of doing the right thing and having nothing to show for it - or maybe it’s just because it’s Sansa.

“Harder,” she pants, leaning up to capture his lips in a wet, desperate kiss. He swipes his tongue across her bottom lip and licks inside the hot cavern of her mouth, feeling her tighten around his cock.

As they kiss, his hand travels down to find the bundle of nerves between her thighs. She whimpers into his mouth as his thumb traces circles, applying just the right pressure, listening to her body. He wants – _needs –_ her to finish first.

With a sudden, broken cry, she does. She breaks away from his kiss to voice her pleasure, letting out a cry so loud he slaps a hand over her mouth so the whole of Winterfell won’t hear.

He holds her as she trembles in the afterglow, burying his face in her neck.

“Forgive me,” he begs into her skin, so quiet she might not have heard it. She cradles the plea in the hollow of her throat and tilts her hips to draw him deeper inside.

 _Ask me to forgive you,_ he adds silently, brokenly, trying not to notice how her neck is damp under his lips, _ask me to love you, ask me to stay._

He’s the first to concede, but she’s not so easy to bend, to break. She’s as stubborn now as she was when she was a little girl, stealing lemon cakes from the pantry before supper.

Sansa is stronger than everyone thinks she is. She survived Kings Landing, her dreams shattered to dust, the death of countless family members and everything she suffered at Ramsay’s hands. Sansa always survives. If things were to go wrong between them again, Sansa would have the strength to walk away from this, relatively unscathed.

Jon wouldn’t be able to. He _did_ walk away and he ended up coming back. He can say it’s only for Arya, but he’s not fooling anyone. Sansa is his constant, the one person who’s never given up on him, who cares about him and just always, _always_ wants him near her. Jon’s not as strong as people think he is.

He comes with a strangled groan, pulling out and spilling his seed hot and sticky on her inner thigh.

He won’t give her a bastard. It’s a small display of honour from a man who has none left, and Sansa trembles in his arms.

Exhausted and fragile, she falls quickly into a sleep that evades him.

He falls to the bed beside her, running a tired hand over his face. In her sleep, she curls her body into his, wrapping around him like a wolf. He surrenders with a sigh, draping an arm around her waist and anchoring her to him.

Tomorrow, he’ll have to decide what the future holds. 

But tomorrow can wait.

**Author's Note:**

> wanted to keep it open ended! finish it how you will ;) I'm always struggling to think of prompts/stories for Jonsa. I don't have tumblr but if anyone has any tropes/stories they'd be interested in seeing, drop me a comment or something! :)


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